Nectar drops to one knee periodically and thrusts a bronze probe into the ground. Eventually the little propeller at the top spins and he nods showing his teeth. Shovels and picks chough into the ground. I have one myself and am digging. Thunk of wood sends a shock up my arm, and we withdraw to let Jil Punkinflake do his work; he snaps the nails up and out with his fingers as though they were so many pinecone spines and then lunges from the grave with the lid in his hands. A feeble stink, the meagre welcome this old grave is able to afford, clambers out to us. Nectar and the others are pointing—one side of the empty coffin is bored out in a circular hole leading sideways into the earth, and I can just make out a pallid trunk glistening there in the foggy shadow.

More digging reveals many other graves are in the same condition, their tenants having burrowed or perhaps digested their way through the ground, drawn to each other by an overpowering desire out of mind. Where they conflow, we uncover—with an eruption of stench that scatters us retching and snickering—a massive starfish hump, leprous and trickling with spermy ooze. The thick surface shivers at intervals, and, when exposed to the air, a dancing plume of cold white ethereal fire jets from the low cone at the center, or just above it. The bodies have melted together here, sighing and cooing ... That pungent smell is less and less like decay, and more and more like the must of a living thing, like a stable or a pig wallow.

The odor claws at me, and somehow I am pulling at Lilly, or was it Dusty?, and remembering. We all are falling into remembering ... I see darting windows and halls, these endless halls of mine, dark except for the blazing windows ... parallel lines of the floorboards to the walled horizon, and the mortal webs of the spiders matted with dust ... A huge crescent-shaped building seen from a window, ruins all around. A resonation in the air—I’m in a terrible place I never should have come ...

Someone jostles me and I watch Jil Punkinflake, hanging from a metal pole protruding from the ground and bent over the excavation, a thick canvas glove up to the elbow on his right hand, collecting that ether fire in bottles relayed to him by Keen. Jil Punkinflake avoids touching the thing as he works; when the last bottle is filled, he inches back along the pole and we all help pull him onto sound land.

“Let’s get it covered again,” he says.

Dirt flies, and in no time it is reburied. Nectar is carefully setting the bottles in his grigrio box. Jil Punkinflake plucks up a smaller one, blue and square, and swaggers over to me smiling. He puts it in my hand. Though the icy glass seems empty, I can feel an abrasive swirling through the glass, and without thinking I tamp down on the cork firmly with my thumb.